A key part of my current project is users having the ability to see what other users live near to them. What is the best way to implement this?
I would just ask for country, state and city but because this will be international I can't have a fixed drop down list of states/administrative regions for each country, so if users spell the name of their state differently this will hinder my ability to detect that users live in the same state.
Say for example we have an the Swiss canton "St. Gallen". Some user will spell that as "Saint Gallen", others as "St Gallen" and so on. Which is obviously problematic.
Could I just ask for the zip code and use that? I've found some zipcode tools online but I'm suspecting they don't work very well. Has anyone used them?
Thanks for your asnwers.
Shouldn't you base your query on geographical data rather than administration one? I mean instead of comparing cities/zip codes just find people within, let's say, 5 km from current user location. And if you let every user to choose his/her location on the map, this will be as simple as choosing it from a series of drop-down lists or entering a ZIP code. Also there is an emerging geolocation HTML feature.
Querying such an information is different story thou. You'll probably gonna have to use GIS capabilities of your database: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and others.
Related
I've just spent a long time reading documentation about the Google API Places, and there's some information I don't quite understand.
I need to build an application that can record a travel plan for a user, so a sequence of places.
For this, I need a very simple form, with a "destination" input, which will use "Autocomplete Places".
This endpoint return a place_id for the selected location, which is the only thing I'm allowed to store in a database, according to Google's terms and conditions.
So in my idea, I'll store this id, and a itinerary would be made of a sequence of place_id, without the need to store the place name or anything else. To display the user's itinerary, I'd just have to make Place Details queries, with the identifier.
But the documentation specifies that these ids can change over time, so they advise to redo queries "periodically" to refresh the place_id.
But how can I redo queries if I haven't stored any information about the place, other than the place_id ? Do I need to store the name of the place (and do I have the right to do that?) to be able to retrieve its ID, or am I missing something?
Another thing: I didn't find, or didn't understand, in the terms of use, if I was allowed to store data generated by my site beside Google IDs, for example, to store comments about places.
Sorry if I make language mistakes, im not fluent in english.
Thanks !
I would like to provide users with points when they do a certain thing. For example:
adding article
adding question
answering question
liking article
etc.
Some of them can have conditions like there are only points for first 3 articles a day, but I think I will handle this directly in my code base.
The problem is what would be a good database design to handle this? I think of 3 tables.
user_activities - in this table I will store event types (I use
laravel so it would probably be the event class name) and points for
specific event.
activity_user - pivot table between user_activities and users.
and of course users table
It is very simple so I am worrying that there are some conditions I haven't thought of, and it would come and bite me in the future.
I think you'll need a forth table that is simply "activities" that is simply a list of the kinds of activities to track. This will have an ID column, and then in your user_activities table include an 'activity_id' to link to that. You'll no doubt have unique information for each kind, for example an activities table may have columns like
ID : unique ID per laravel
ACTIVITY_CODE : short code to use as part of application/business logic
ACTIVITY_NAME : longer name that is for display name like "answered a question"
EVENT : what does the user have to do to trigger the activity award
POINT_VALUE: how many points for this event
etc
If you think that points may change in the future (eg. to encourage certain user activities) then you'll want to track the actual point awarded at the time in the user activities table, or some way to track what the points were at any one time.
While I'm suggesting fourth table, what you really need is more carefully worded list of features to be implemented before doing any design work. My example of allowing for points awarded to change over time is such a feature that you don't mention but you'll need to design for if this feature is needed.
Well I have found this https://laracasts.com/lessons/build-an-activity-feed-in-laravel as very good solution. Hope it helps someone :)
I need to apply a filter in some report for some users.
I was told that the best way to do this is a security filter but i discovered that security filters are applied to all the reports that the user open.
I need some kind o filter that filter an attribute on a user but just on some reports, not all.
example:
if report1{
if user1 then attribute = 1
if user2 then attribute = 2
}
let's say i have departments and chiefs of those departments.
It is not a matter of security but a matter of comfort.
I want to avoid the chief of a department to manually select (prompt) his department.
It would be more comfortable if the system would recognize the user and show the data of his interest.
There a different ways to solve this kind of scenario, depending on the level of flexibility you want to offer to your user and the effort you need to implement and maintain the solution.
The User Login way
No flexibility, low maintenance, more effort to implement
Use the User Login prompt. This is a system prompt (created by default MicroStrategy) that returns the user login. If you have a table with the data that a user can see like this:
UserLogin YourAttribute
user1 attribute1
user2 attribute2
user3 attribute3
... ...
You can create an attribute UserLogin to be parent of the Attribute you want to use as filter and then create a filter (User Login = User Login System prompt)that you will put in your report.
More detailed information can be found here.
Once implemented this solution will you need to maintain that new table and when the user run a report with that filter it will be able to see only his data. It's similar to a security filter, but now you can decide where to apply the filter.
Multiple reports for multiple prompt defaults
Flexibility, high maintenance, little effort to implement
For each user create a copy of that report with the proper answer as default.
Maybe you can create ten reports now, but if you need to modify that report tomorrow you will need to modify ten report or recreate again all copies with different prompt answers.
Anyway this is good for the users, because they can change the prompt answers if they need.
Using URL to answer prompts
Flexibility, low maintenance, variable effort to implement
Instead to run the report using MicroStrategy you can provide to each user a specific URL that, using MicroStrategy URLAPI, answer automatically the prompt.
Of course you need to prepare the URLs in advance or find a way to do it programmatically. This is a good solution if the user don't want to navigate the MicroStrategy web interface but just run the report.
Subscribe the prompt answers
Flexibility, low maintenance, medium effort to implement
Have the report with the proper prompt answer delivered to your user every morning (or when you want). Using MicroStrategy Distribution Services you can deliver a report or document to your user and for each user you can specify the correct prompt answers.
No user can receive the full report in their mail box or just a link to their history link, opening that link they will see the report with their data. Of course users (or probably you) will need to setup all the subscriptions required.
Final thoughts
In these case I prefer to leave flexibility to users and teach them how to use the product. Of course there are some people they have no time for this kind of things (usually C something levels), in that case the best this is to have the data delivered to their email.
I understand some of these options are not that straight forward to implement if you are new to MicroStrategy.
My suggestion: for now go with the subscriptions (if you can) or teach your users how to save their own copy of that report (in My Reports) with the prompt already answered (oh, yes, this was another option, but each user has to do it), every time they will open it now, the prompt won't show up (but if you change the original report they will need to do it again).
Let me know if you need more details.
Hi Sitepoint wizard people,
Say we have an admin application that has multiple users and various objects. What I'd like to do is control access within the object itself - that is, it will behave one way for one type of user, and another way for other users. For example...
Director Mike can override Reception user Sally's registration date. One would assume that Mike could set any date both in the past or in the future. Then we have Payroll user Steve who can also modify Sally's registration date, but only for dates in the past up until (for example) one year ago. To spice things up, then we have the HR Manager Mary who can also amend Sally's registration date, but only for dates from precisely 23rd June 2007 up until one month from now...
How can I program the access restrictions so that on the front end, the form control is restricted with a min and max date, and in the backend, the validator checks the entered date to make sure it falls between those dates? I'd obviously need to be able to tweak the min and max dates for each user type. Other objects might have different parameters - maximum amount on a discount field or days of the week for overtime, for example.
I've asked this question in different ways, but each time I get bogged down by the implementation. I'm currently developing it as a php/MySQL web-based application, but thoughts and comments from other platforms very welcome! This time I'm looking at first principles, so it doesn't matter what your background is, if you have any ideas, please let me know! What do you even call this type of access control...?
Depending of how you application is based, you could ask for credentials at the start of the application and depending on who is requiring access, you could load a different xml file containing different settings.
As for security issue, make sure that the different xml files can't be reached by the users.
Edit:
Since you are using MySQL you could do something like this.
Let's say you have a table of users that has those fields : UserId, UserName, RestrictionId.
And with a Restriction table that looks like : RestrictionId, FieldName, FieldCondition.
This way, in your php app, when a user is authenticated, you can go fetch the correct "Restrictions" on the field and apply them in your code. If it happens that you have multiple fields that require different rules then you can simply add them with the correct RestrictionId.
This DB design is far from perfect, I'm pretty sure you can do better
Since, you are already using MySql db. You can maintain the UserRole Master table details in DB itself. Load the user role data based on login, then you can easily validate the changes made by the user accordingly.
I have a web application that syncs Outlook contacts to a database (and back) via CDO. The DB contains every contact only once (at least theoretically, of course doublets happen), providing a single point of change for a contact, regardless of how many users have that particular contact in Outlook (like Interaction or similar products).
The sync process is not automatic, but user-initialized. An arbitrary timespan can pass before users decide to sync their contacts. A subset of these contacts may have been updated by other users in the meantime.
Generally, this runs fine, but I have never been able to solve this fundamental problem:
How do I doubtlessly identify a contact object in a mailbox?
I can't rely on PR_ENTRYID, this
property changes on contact move or
mailbox move.
I can't rely on my own IDs (e.g. DB
table ID), because these get copied
with the contact.
I absolutely can't rely on fields
like name or e-mail address, they
are subject to changes and updates.
Currently I use a combination of 1 (preferred) and 2 (fall-back). But inevitably, sometimes users run into the problem of synching to the wrong contact because there is none with a given PR_ENTRYID, but two with the same DB ID, of which the wrong one is chosen.
There are a bunch of Outlook-synching products out there, so I guess the problem must be solvable.
I had a similar problem to overcome with an internal outlook plugin that does contact syncing. I ended up sticking a database id in the Outlook object and referring to that when doing syncs.
The difference here is that our system has a bunch of duplicates that get resolved later by the users. When they get merged I'll remove the old records and update outlook with all of the new information along with a new id.
You could do fuzzy matching to identify duplicates, but duplicate resolution is a funny problem that's mostly trial and error. We've been successful at implementing "fuzzy" matching logic using the levenshtein distance algorithm for names and addresses cleaned down to a hash code.
Good luck, my syncing experiences have been somewhat painful.